Malcolm X was one of the seminal figures of the African-American community in the 1960s. Having begun life as the largely abandoned child of a mother who became insane, served time in prison, and ultimately joined the Nation of Islam and becoming one of its most influential advocates, Malcolm X represents what Nancy Clasby considers to have been the full gamut of experiences that are available for black Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.[1] Having lived in the agrarian and the northern industrialized regions of the country, "Malcolm had already lived in an atmosphere of explicit violence - his father was laid across the streetcar tracks and killed by whites and their home was burned because of his father's allegiance to Marcus Garvey."[2]
While he was in prison, Malcolm Little (also known as Detroit Red) embraced the religious ideology of the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Adopting the belief that "the white man is the devil," Malcolm attempted to create himself anew by breaking down the "old master-slave relationship which characterized the ties of the black minority to white society."[3]
Had he wished to do so, Malcolm X could have found a religious and theological home in the Christian Protestant churches where his father was a pastor. E. Franklin Frazier has stated that "for the masses of Negroes, the Negro Church was a refuge, though increasingly less of a refuge, in a hostile white world."[4] Indeed, other men of Malcolm's generation such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King found within the traditional Black Church a source not only of religious support, but also a network in which social activism addressing racism could be developed. It was not, however, Malcolm's decision to follow in the footsteps of his father and it was instead his conviction that nothing in white America would be receptive to the aspiration of black Americans that led him to the Nation of Islam.[5]...